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Twitter disappoints with user numbers as losses widen

Twitter's revenue rose 116% to $243m in the fourth quarter, but its shares fell at least 10% in after-hours trading over worries about the growth in new users.

The social network's closely-watched number of average monthly active users (MAUs) was 241 million as of December 31, an increase of 30% year-over-year. But analysts pointed out that was only 3.8% more than the previous quarter.

Analysts were also disappointed by Twitter's quarterly “Timeline Views”, its equivalent of page-views or a measure of user engagement, which fell from about 159 billion to 148 billion.

“What this report will do is it will question how mainstream is Twitter as a platform,” Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach, told Reuters.

“Both in the US and internationally, the monthly active user base did not grow as fast as people thought, and that has an impact on the number of timeline views.”

Twitter losses for the year widened to of $645m, from $8.7m a year earlier. Revenue for the year was $665m, more than double 2012's $316m figure.

This was Twitter's first quarterly earnings statement since going public in November at $26 a share. The stock climbed to around $70 in December, before falling to around $59 over night.

Twitter said advertising revenue for the quarter rose 121% to $220m, with mobile advertising making up more than 75% of that total. International revenue soared 200% to $66m.

Chief executive Dick Costolo said: "Twitter finished a great year with our strongest financial quarter to date. We are the only platform that is public, real-time, conversational and widely distributed and I'm excited by the number of initiatives we have under way to further build upon the Twitter experience."

The company projected revenue for the first quarter of 2014 of $230 million to $240 million, and full-year revenue of between $1.15 billion and $1.2 billion.